Council: The Emergence of an IoT Think Tank

BEFORE THE CLOUD Up until 2000, connectivity and data storage were too expensive to store anything but demos. In 1998, from my readings of arts and computer science literature and my interest in interactivity and interfaces, I stumbled onto the Intelligent Information Interfaces (I3) Research initiative, which aimed to develop new human-centered interfaces for interacting with information for a broad population. I3 had two followup programs. The first was the Disappearing Computer, whose mission was “to see how information technology can be diffused into everyday objects and settings and to see how this can lead to new ways of supporting and enhancing people’s lives that go above and beyond what is possible with the computer today.”1 The second followup program was Convivio—a network for the people-centered design of interactive systems (http://cordis.europa.eu /project/rcn/67029_en.html). I learned that this kind of thinking— of embedding an environment with algorithmic “intelligence” or feedback response—had a history in pervasive computing (see Mark Weiser’s work2) and ambient intelligence. At UbiComp 2002, I tried to raise the issue of animism and argued that objects already have affordances and connotations. I sincerely questioned why every tree should have an RFID tag. I wasn’t understood. The engineers and computer scientists, fully in their “optimizing 5 efficiency” paradigm, kept innovating within their own small reduction of reality, outsourcing all consequences (waste and any effects on jobs, learning, and society at large) to other actors. As they kept innovating within two protocols—TCP-IP and HTML, which merely “pass on” the packet or link, respectively, with no looking back or looking forward and no reciprocity—it was easy for me to see that a new ontology was being born in a fully commercial environment. It had no ethics and didn’t care about its repercussions. But as we were still just talking about offline gadgets and demos, this ambient intelligence could still be mediated. Then the cloud hit the ground.